Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny